In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a male Guardian columnist, Mr Phineas Harper, announcing his plan to heroically advance “gender equality” via the medium of self-absorption and by wearing a pleated skirt. Guardian readers were invited to believe that the sight of Mr Harper “dancing in skirts” and feeling “buoyed up” by compliments regarding his ensemble would, in ways never quite pinned down, liberate British women from their grim, downtrodden existence.

We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.

And we concluded a trilogy of posts on the subject of crime and punishment – and the status-chasing contortions of progressives, for whom, pretentious leniency is a kind of social jewellery with which to impress one’s peers. And according to whom, the wellbeing of habitual burglars is much more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, whose homes have just been violated, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”

And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.

The world of art enriched us in March, thanks to the Guardian’s gushing coverage of an exhibition – curated “in partnership with local LGBTQ+ groups” – of mass-produced My Little Pony dolls. Faced with piles of items both ubiquitous and banal, visitors to the exhibition were assured that the plastic objects on display, which could be found in any toy shop in any city, are tools of resistance for the marginalised and unseen, and are “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” Yes, a full-on face-blast of culture.

We also stared in disappointment at the creations of Ms Caitlin Blunnie, whose modish but unremarkable illustrations are adorned with slogans of supposedly staggering profundity. Among the penetrating insights to be found were “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” “Smash the state and masturbate,” and, entirely without irony, “Abortion builds new futures.”

Further artistic rumblings were detected at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, where patrons were warned that, by liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption. Via new and scrupulously progressive signage, visitors were informed that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts deemed disconcerting, racist, and very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

The thrills of public transport came to our attention in April – specifically, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where female commuters were issued with “bystander intervention cards” with which to repel the network’s growing number of junkies, muggers and public masturbators. The cards, we were assured, albeit unconvincingly, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” More obvious methods of restoring some semblance of civilisation – say, by arresting the aforementioned junkies, muggers and masturbators – were left seemingly unexplored.

We also marvelled at an attempt to problematise the much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, via the joyless prattle of Lukas Shayo. Mr Shayo, a graduate of CUNY and denizen of Brooklyn, attempted to establish his credentials by telling us how “violent” and “sexist” the strip is, and by complaining about the absence of smartphones, the inaccurate depiction of imaginary dinosaurs, and the strip’s protagonist spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader. Those familiar with the strip may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.

And via the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, we pondered romantic complications of a very modern kind – namely, the woes of a woman who wants to pretend that she’s a gay man, but who was thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps. And so, we had a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, but who can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. The woman in question struggled with her partner’s claims of sudden-onset transgenderism and fabulist pronouns, while expecting observance of her own. Which did rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

May brought to our attention a cornerstone of many a progressive worldview – specifically, allegations of randomness regarding everyone’s birth. As if you – the person reading this – could somehow have been born to entirely unrelated people, with entirely different ancestors who are entirely unconnected to the ancestors one does actually have – and still be the same person. Because, it seems, it was mere “luck and random chance” that your parents’ child was you. Needless to say, the people making these claims were not themselves parents. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some arbitrary or pointless occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events.

Days later, scenes from a bus stop in Ruislip, Greater London, took on symbolic qualities and offered us a snapshot of a culture being downgraded, rapidly and perhaps irretrievably, thanks to its its supposed enrichment by newcomers for whom queueing is a seemingly alien concept. We then explored the gleeful and not infrequent punishment for those careless enough to notice such things.

We also looked on as the Vancouver Police Department, the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation insisted on referring to a deranged man as somehow being a woman, thereby setting fire to whatever credibility they could still be said to have. The man in question, Nathaniel Francis Beekmeyer, had recorded social-media videos in which he describes himself as “super cute” and “a beautiful person,” and hence his enthusiasm for assaulting random women and their four-month-old babies. The passers-by who intervened and overpowered Mr Beekmeyer faced further strange behaviour on seeing news reports in which this shirtless man was referred to by the police and media as a woman. As if their own, first-hand perceptions, from mere inches away, were somehow wildly and implausibly inaccurate.

In June, we encountered the deep, woke wisdom of Hannah McElhinney, who wanted us to know about her “queer temporality,” and the fact that “LGBTQ+ people experience time differently to straight and/or cisgender people.” Which, entirely coincidentally, makes her much more special than you. Paying attention to one’s queerness is, we learned, a favoured activity, along with mentioning at length the crushing burdens of being so complicated and fascinating. As opposed to those ordinary mortals who experience time in a humdrum, heteronormative way.

Another cognitive colossus raised our eyebrows days later, in the form of the World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken. Ms Auken wishes to correct our primitive, territorial lifestyles – say, by making us surrender our cars to random strangers, at seemingly random intervals, and for purposes unknown. Having people you don’t know take away your car would, we were assured, be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.” This vision of an unpropertied tomorrow, in which everything belongs to the state, and nothing belongs to you, prompted many replies, among which, “Anybody ever wash a rented car? No?” And, “Sorry about your wife going into labour, I needed some cigarettes. By the way, you need some new tyres.”

And we beheld the dazzling thoughts of Atlantic columnist Xochitl Gonzalez, a supposedly downtrodden Person Of Pigmentation, whose article was highlighted by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. Ms Gonzalez wanted us to believe that she is oppressed by expectations of reciprocal courtesy and basic consideration. Say, the assumption that you won’t wander into a library, where people are studying for exams, and start blasting out loud music. When not denouncing the “gentrification” of white library patrons, whose appreciation of Brooklyn hip hop combos is insufficiently fulsome, Ms Gonzalez spends her time mentioning how “minority” and “of colour” she is, as if waiting for applause. Or at least deference.

July introduced us to the world of politically radical tableware. By which, I mean unattractive, poorly made objects intended to propagate pretentious racial guilt. Our guide to this phenomenon, Victoria Burgher, a PhD student at the University of Westminster, insisted that creating unattractive plates is “crucial to any antiracist social justice work.” When not making unsightly tat, Ms Burgher spends her time telling the credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.” You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

No less radical was Kate Auletta, the editor-in-chief of Scary Mommy, a publication for ladies of a progressive leaning. Ms Auletta’s contribution to human advancement entails showing her bare arse to her small boys, then applauding herself in print. Having listed her numerous physical imperfections, including a big, sagging bosom and a fat upper pubic area, Ms Auletta went on to detail the ways in which her two small boys are being politically improved by the sight of her incongruous crack and badger. This feat of not wearing knickers.

And we encountered Argentina’s first transgender pilot, a burly chap now named Traniela Campolieto, who bangs on about the super-girly tightness of his uniform while using the cockpit to take endless, pouting selfies. Before becoming a shimmering vision of womanliness, Mr Campolieto was a professional bodybuilder, a proverbial brick shithouse. Which may explain his enthusiasm for bad wigs, the transformative powers of which may have been overestimated. And so, the pilot in charge of 250 tonnes of Airbus A330, and on whom the lives of 400 or so passengers depend, is a man whose perceptions are somewhat unreliable, not least regarding himself.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority. Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Oh, and we were treated to the creative efforts of artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose juddering and convulsions were artistically enhanced by twenty-five pounds of powdered cheese. When not “investigating bodies of cultural debris” and being showered with atomised dairy products, Mr Romania teaches those less gifted than himself at New York’s Centre for Performance Research and other places of learning.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a lesson in pronouns and pretending, or dishonesty-on-demand, courtesy of the suddenly ungendered Laurie Penny – now, it seems, a they, depending on who’s nearby and how fashionable they are. And so, we pondered animal pronouns, clown pronouns and pronouns that can change randomly, depending on whim, several times a day. Such is the hamster-wheel world of competitive self-definition.

We also flicked through the pages of The Atlantic, where senior editor Honor Jones, a woman oppressed by comfort and fidelity, shared a somewhat bewildering account of her divorce from a loving and faithful husband. Chief among her reasons were a desire to “be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy,” a feat no married woman can apparently hope to achieve, and a dislike of crumbs – a recurring topic, mentioned seven times.

And we witnessed the denouncing of racist traffic cameras. Which is to say, devices that record which demographics speed and run red lights, and endanger lives, much more often than others. Writing in ProPublica, Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez conjured a remarkable series of excuses for repeat offenders, who were presented as oppressed, as “activists for racial equity,” and all but heroic, despite some committing 11 offences in a single year. Humdrum notions of personal responsibility were of course avoided, leaving readers to suppose that the only conceivable explanation for the lawbreakers’ behaviour, and consequent fines, was “structural racism.”

In February, we were treated to cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja, whose artistic immensity has enthralled us before, and regarding whom, the Los Angeles Times gushed, “Kierkegaard comes to mind, as do Sartre and Dostoevsky.”

We also witnessed the mental unspooling of San Francisco school board members, among whom mismanagement and conspiracy theories are elevated to an art form, and for whom two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad is sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee is a perfectly normal use of one’s time.

And via The Independent, we heard of the latest moral crisis and cause of deep mental “trauma” – namely, aircraft seatbelts and insufficiently commodious plus-size bath towels.

March brought us the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white, along with an implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.

Pale devilry cropped up again, as educator and activist Maia Niguel Hoskin, writing in Forbes, told us that when a black millionaire celebrity publicly slaps another black millionaire celebrity, this is all the fault of white people and “white supremacist culture.” You see, for an educator and activist, the way to be “anti-racist” is to erase any agency, and any expectation of self-possession, from people with brown skin.

We also witnessed a display of intersectional ruggedness, thanks to Ailish Breen, a being with pronouns, and her troupe of ostentatiously “queer hikers,” who regard a simple walk in the countryside as both “quite political” and a basis for complaint, and for whom the very air is yet another a form of oppression. Among the troupe’s many grievances was the phrase “conquering the outdoors,” a term whose weight bears down on their delicate souls. That the expression refers to overcoming one’s own limitations or imagined limitations – which among the less pretentious is generally regarded as a good thing – somehow escaped their notice.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with an oddly specific medical diagnosis courtesy of the Guardian, where Afua Hirsch informed us that boob eczema is caused by “racist microaggressions.” Readers were left to suppose that the condition might only be resolved by lengthy grumbling about “structural racism” and the oppressive nature of “whiteness.” More prosaic solutions – say, a change of detergent, or indeed bra, were not explored. “Whiteness” also bedevilled Ms Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, who was both mystified and aggravated by the existence of non-white Trump supporters, and who identified “multiracial whiteness” as the only conceivable explanation. For Ms Beltrán, non-white voters who prefer to be engaged with as individuals, as opposed to racial mascots, are merely surrendering to “whiteness” and “white supremacy.” And so, Ms Beltrán bemoaned racism and “the debasement of others” while casually erasing agency from anyone brownish who happens to disagree with her.

Meanwhile, academics at the University of York were rendered fretful and distraught by an image on the website of an art history conference – specifically, of the seventeenth-century Buddhist figurine, the three wise monkeys – which, via much focussing of intersectional lenses, was construed by our academics as a caricature of black people, and therefore oppressive. And denunciations of “whiteness” and “white supremacy” also featured in a mandatory course at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. On grounds that, in order to be a dentist, you must first submit to condescension and insults, and accusations of being either a bigot or an enabler of bigotry, based solely on unchangeable aspects of your appearance.

In February, we beheld the chutzpah of our new downtrodden elite at the United Nations International School, where the children of diplomats and titans of international banking insisted that even a single mispronunciation of an unobvious name is a form of “racial trauma” inflicted by “the white man’s mouth.” Elsewhere, at the University of Minnesota, we heard one student recount his experience of racial profiling and police brutality – “the most traumatic thing I have ever experienced” – and then, thanks to dashcam video, saw what actually happened.

And in the Los Angeles Times, the scrupulously progressive Virginia Heffernan aired her outrage at neighbours who cleared the snow from her driveway, but failed to vote for Joe Biden – the latter act requiring “absolution,” and thus excusing Ms Heffernan’s supposedly principled ingratitude for the former. You see, resenting neighbours’ acts of kindness, and publicly badmouthing those neighbours, in print, is the progressive way, and a basis for expecting applause.

Oh, and we also learned how to turn toilet paper into drinkable alcohol.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a display of the Guardian’s famed sense of proportion, with the paper’s Barbara Ellen informing us, emphatically, that, “We’re nearly all vegan now” – we being the general population – before asking with equal confidence, “Who isn’t vegan in some way these days?” The Vegan Society, meanwhile, acknowledged that the demographic in question amounts to barely 1% of the British population. Hungry for more fearless and irrefutable leftwing journalism, we turned to the pages of Salon, where the chronically breathless Mr Chauncey DeVega declared that “The American people” – and not just Salon columnists – “are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.” 300 million citizens are, we learned, living in fear of Mr Trump’s “fascism,” his allegedly annihilationist tendencies, and of course his “secret police.”

Meanwhile, Slate readers mulled the moral quandaries of progressive life, before being rewarded with somewhat peculiar and potentially disastrous advice, on subjects including sex tapes and prodigious weight gain. And via which, we learned that the best way for an insecure straight woman to find romantic and sexual satisfaction is for her to start dating polyamorists and gay people, on grounds that this will ease both her trust issues and her frequent panic attacks.

In February, we learned, via the Guardian, of the latest must-have status accessory – namely, dinner parties at which one pays $2,500 to be scolded as a racist, an upholder of “white supremacy,” based on nothing, by someone suitably brown and opportunist. Participants – “mostly Democrats” – are told to “own their racism,” however invisible, and are warned against having “unmonitored thoughts.” Elsewhere in the Guardian, we were assured by leader writer Susanna Rustin that a “reordering of society” is in order, to correct the apparently unendurable problem of some people having a standard of living not yet available to every single human being on the planet. “Lives of luxury” – defined by “weekly shopping sprees” – could be “replaced” – “painlessly” – with “artistic expression and creativity,” specifically, dance lessons.

While in Salon, Bay Area progressive Nicole Karlis wrote of the “heartache, tears and stress” brought on by the loss of one’s plastic water bottle. A sentiment echoed by fellow progressives and non-specific activists, who shared their wrenching tales of “water-bottle separation anxiety,” a phenomenon that can apparently induce fits of weeping and feelings of “falling into chaos.”

In March, readers of the Observer were invited to ponder the profound moral question, “Is it ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner?” Much fretting ensued regarding the acceptable sex and skin colour of the person doing the cleaning, with the paper’s Sally Howard deciding that the most feminist way to empower cleaning ladies – and to avoid the “structural devaluation of women’s work” – is to make said ladies unemployed. The views of Ms Howard’s former cleaners, fired in the name of feminism, were not deemed worthy of inclusion.